Well, I'd like to begin a new series of sermons today through the book of Galatians, so if you would please turn there with me. Galatians 1, I will be considering verses 1 through 10.
I'll let you remain seated this morning as we read Galatians 1, 1 through 10. Hear now the word of the Lord. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever.
Amen. I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. Not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. For even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. Am I now seeking the approval of man or of God?
Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. Let's pray. Lord, how vulnerable we are to things that would destroy our souls. But how perfectly attentive and aware you are of your children, the ones that you have redeemed through the blood of your Son. And so as we come to yet another portion of your holy word today, to consider its meaning, its application to our lives, would you open our eyes that we might behold wonderful things in it? Lord, use the truths contained in this passage of scripture to expose lies that we believe and to solidify your truth in our minds. To solidify your love in our hearts, your gospel in our souls for the saving of our souls. I pray this in Jesus' name.
Amen. When choosing what series or book in the Bible to preach next, I try to keep a couple of principles in mind. First, I try to alternate between Old and New Testament, so as not to neglect either. We believe that all of scripture is breathed out by God, right? And profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction and instruction in righteousness.
And so we dare not be negligent with any portion of that inspired and beneficial word. Secondly, I try to take into consideration what portions of scripture, if any, have not been addressed or at least not addressed recently so that we aren't guilty of limiting our interaction with God's word to just a few favorite themes or favorite passages, favorite doctrines. But so that we interact with the whole counsel of God's word. Well, we've just finished a year in the book of Ezekiel and according to our sermon archives, one of the New Testament books that has been preached from the least here at Grace Church is the book of Galatians. Now there's a sense in which no matter what passage of scripture you choose to preach from, there's no wrong choice, right? It's all going to edify the church. At the same time, however, we want to be as broad and deep in our understanding of God's word as God's word is.
And so we want to make the effort to conscientiously plumb all of its depths and avail ourselves of all of its riches. So we're going to spend some time in a book that has not been recently or systematically preached here at Grace Church and it's the book of Galatians. The apostle Paul is the author of this New Testament letter. The recipients are the churches in Galatia, he says.
Galatia was a region to the north of the Mediterranean Sea, what is now modern day Turkey. Paul's epistle to the Galatian church is in fact one of the earliest New Testament books, if not the first New Testament book to have been written. And it was likely written about 15 years after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. This would have been during Paul's first missionary journey.
And so the corresponding time period in the book of Acts is described for us in chapters 12 through 15 of Acts. And it's interesting that that time period culminates with the Jerusalem Council. And you'll remember that the Jerusalem Council was an early church gathering of leaders that addressed the very issue that Paul is contending with in the book of Galatians.
So what was that issue? Well it was a false teaching that was infiltrating the church. And before we look at what this false teaching was specifically, isn't it interesting that just 15 years after the resurrection there is already false teaching vying for the allegiance of the early church and even making significant inroads into the church.
That's fascinating to us that so soon after the resurrection of Christ that's happening. And I think what this tells us is that battling for false teaching in the church is not some unique feature of our day and age. The attack on the church with the weapon of wrong teaching has been present and active in the church since the very beginning. When there were still living eyewitnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ walking the earth, false doctrine was already making inroads into the church. There are a couple of lessons we should learn from this I think.
First of all, don't be naive. There are enemies of the cross that hate Jesus Christ, that hate the gospel, that hate the people who have been saved by the gospel of Jesus Christ. And these enemies would love nothing more than to overthrow the church if they could and wreck and ruin the faith of as many Christians as possible.
This is nothing new. Peter said in 1 Peter 4.12, Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you as though something strange were happening to you. We don't need to be naive to the reality of enemies of the cross. But there's another lesson to be learned from this reality of false teaching in the early church and it's this, don't be discouraged. The enemies of the cross have been trying their best from the very beginning to destroy the church and to erase the gospel but you know what?
They can't. False teachers have been taking their best swings at the church since the time of Paul and yet the church marches on. What did Christ say? He said that even the gates of hell will not prevail against the church. He said that not one of his sheep will be lost.
He said that he is able to keep us from stumbling and to present us blameless before the presence of his glory on the last day. So don't be caught off guard by resistance to the gospel. Don't be discouraged by resistance to the gospel. Keep fighting the good fight. Keep keeping the faith. Press on toward the goal.
Press on with a sword in your hand because the battle is not done. What then was this false teaching that was infiltrating the churches of Galatia? It was the false teaching that Christian obedience demands adherence to certain Jewish ceremonial laws. Some taught, for example, that Christian males are morally obligated to be physically circumcised.
Others taught that Christians were morally obligated to observe the various dietary restrictions of the Old Testament, forbidding the eating of pork, for example, or sharing a meal with an unconverted Gentile. This false teaching was not a denial of the deity of Christ or of the necessity of the cross like the full Jews were doing. I suspect this is what made it so alluring. It had a ring of truth to it. A good lie is a believable lie, a credible lie. A false gospel that outright denies the work or person of Christ is not credible, but a false gospel that affirms the personal work of Christ but then adds something to that work is a much more subtle and therefore believable heresy. That's what these false teachers in Galatia were doing. They were affirming an orthodox gospel but then adding a few things to that gospel. So it wasn't a frontal attack per se on the person of Christ. It was more a rear attack on the sufficiency of Christ. Now we will learn more about these false teachers and their false gospel as we make our way through the book of Galatians.
But for now, suffice it to say that Paul's opponents are false teachers who sound orthodox but are not. Paul's message then is simply this, that sinners are justified by faith in Jesus Christ and not by keeping the law of God. That's the message of what is perhaps the oldest book in the New Testament. That sinners are justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. And ironically, nothing is more central to the message of the entire Bible than that.
Christ and Christ alone saves sinners. Let's see if we can follow Paul's argument through this important letter and allow that argument to bolster our own confidence in the sufficiency of Christ. The letter begins with a purposeful greeting, a purposeful greeting from Paul to the churches of Galatia. And even in his greeting, Paul begins to lay out the case against these false teachers.
Look with me again at verse 1. Paul, an apostle, not from men nor through man but through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead. So Paul right out of the gate begins by asserting his credentials. I am an apostle.
In other words, I'm writing to you as one who has authority. And not just any authority, Paul had apostolic authority. To be an apostle in the sense in which Paul is using the title, one had to have been a disciple of Jesus Christ, that is a follower, a student of Jesus.
He had to be an eyewitness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, something which Paul experienced on the road to Damascus. And he had to be called to the office of apostle by Jesus Christ himself, something that Paul makes explicitly clear when he says he wasn't called from men nor through man but through Jesus Christ and God the Father. An apostle couldn't just designate himself an apostle. No, he had to be called by God, appointed by God to that role. And the men whom God appointed to that role, Scripture says in Ephesians 2.20, were vested with such authority that they were the very foundation upon which the church is built.
These few men were entrusted with divine authority over the church. To reject an apostle is to reject the one who appointed the apostle. In other words, to reject Paul is to reject Christ.
It's that big of a deal. Now, Paul is going to spend a good amount of his letter defending his apostleship. So was this just Paul being braggadocious?
No, he wasn't being braggadocious because first of all, it was true. He really was entrusted by Christ with the full authority of an apostle. But secondly, as we will see throughout the letter, he wasn't driven by ambition or pride. He was driven by care for the church that was entrusted to him. There was a threat so insidious that it was endangering the very souls of the Galatian Christians. For Paul not to fight back then with every weapon at his disposal would have been the arrogant, self-centered thing to do. But asserting his authority over the church was exactly what an apostle like Paul was charged to do by none other than God himself.
Now, before we move on to verse 2, I want to point out something that's going to be helpful to us as we progress through this epistle. Someone once said that reading Paul's letters is kind of like hearing one side of a phone conversation. You don't know what's being said on the other end of the call, but you do hear the responses to what's being said to the other end of the call. And so through deduction and inference, you can get a pretty good idea of the other half of the conversation. In Paul's letter to Galatia, we don't hear the false teachers themselves, but we do hear Paul's rebuttal of the false teachers. And so we can sort of read between the lines to a degree and figure out what these false teachers must have been saying. Bible interpreters call this process mirror reading.
We're reading one half of the conversation and from that we deduce the other half of the conversation. If Paul spends a lot of time defending his apostleship, for example, then we can rightly assume that these false teachers were challenging the legitimacy of Paul's authority. If Paul claims that he is not driven by a desire to be just a people pleaser, then we can assume the false teachers were accusing him of being a people pleaser. And so by reading Paul's responses, we begin to get a fairly detailed perspective of what these false teachers were like and what their false teaching was all about. Well, this brings us to verse 2 where Paul alludes to the company he keeps. He says, and all the brothers who are with me. In other words, Paul is not living and ministering in a vacuum.
He has an entire team of ministers and servants and assistants with him. There is accountability surrounding Paul and there is corroboration surrounding Paul. Not only has Paul's authority as an apostle been established by Jesus Christ, the head of the church, it's also been confirmed by the very church whom Paul is serving.
To question that authority then is misinformed and harmful on the part of the Galatians. Well, Paul then pronounces a blessing on the churches of Galatia, verse 3, And by this blessing, Paul is acknowledging the genuineness of the faith of the Christians to whom he is writing. He's also reminding them of the sufficiency of the atoning work of Jesus Christ when he says, No matter what these false teachers are asserting, Jesus is sufficient.
Jesus has rescued us from this present evil age with all of its silly false teachers and contradictory claims and sinful assertions. Jesus is enough, Paul says, so let me remind you of it at the very outset of my letter. What's interesting then after verse 5 is what Paul doesn't say. If you survey all of Paul's letters in the New Testament, you begin to notice a clear pattern. First he identifies himself at the start of the letter, then he identifies his audience, then he typically presents a blessing on them. So far so good, but the typical next step in Paul's letters is for Paul to thank God for the praiseworthy things he has seen or heard about in the lives of the Christians to whom he is writing. This word of thanksgiving is typically followed by a prayer for continued blessing and growth on behalf of the letter's recipients.
But in this letter to Galatia, there is no word of thanksgiving or prayer for continued blessing. Instead, Paul just jumps straight into a shocked reaction to their faithlessness. Verse 6, I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel. These Galatians had heard the gospel from the mouth of an apostle, and all of this happened just 15 years after the resurrection of Jesus Christ. How is it that they could be so quickly and easily swayed by a handful of false teachers to believe a different gospel? Now notice Paul is not astonished at the false teachers. As we've already pointed out, the presence of false teachers seeking to wreck and ruin the church is nothing new. What Paul is astonished at is the fact that Christians who have heard the true gospel and been transformed by that gospel are believing something else. And Paul is astonished at the quickness with which these new Christians are abandoning their newfound faith. That's something to be astonished by.
That's something to be grieved over. That's something worth skipping over the niceties and jumping straight to a stern rebuke. Paul gets right to the point. He cuts to the chase.
He goes for the jugular. Why? Because of the fact, verse 7, that there is no other gospel than the one and only true gospel. It is exclusive, without equal, without alternative. If we were to list every doctrine contained in the Bible, every truth, every proposition, every assertion, every implied principle, and we arrange them in order of importance, at the top of the list would have to be the gospel, the power of God unto salvation, the means by which our souls can escape hell and spend eternity in heaven. This is the point of the Bible. This is the reason Jesus Christ had to come. This is the glorious end to which all the saints of God are heading. This is the unspeakable joy that all souls who fall short of the glory of God miss out on.
This is the point. If our whole reason for existence, our chief end, is to bring glory to God and enjoy Him forever, the way to do that is by getting saved through the blood of Christ and spending eternity basking in His glorious presence. Nothing is more important or central to our very existence and purpose as human beings than the gospel. And yet here was a group of professing Christians whose lives had presumably been radically altered by this same gospel, but who are now flirting with a different gospel, a distorted gospel, which is to say they were toying with something that was no gospel at all. If this can be true of the first generation of post-cavalry Christians, brothers and sisters, it can be true of us. If we do not hold fast to the faith once for all delivered to the saints through the inspired witness of the apostles, we are susceptible to the mortal danger of believing another gospel. Perhaps we sit here this morning feeling ultra secure that we're in a Bible-believing church that rightly administers the sacraments and observes the regulative principle of worship and seeks to structure its ethics and outreach and families all according to scripture, and all those things are incredibly wonderful blessings. But Christian, we dare not take the gospel for granted.
We dare not compromise it, rethink it, alter it, tweak it, accommodate it to an ever-changing culture, adapt it to the whims of our generation. The gospel, the true gospel, will never change. But there are some, verse 7, who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. What are some of the ways the gospel gets distorted? In Galatia, as we will see, the distortion had to do with adding to the sufficiency of Christ.
They were saying Jesus Christ has died for sins and been raised again. Great. So you should repent of your sins and believe in him.
Great. But you also need to keep the rules and regulations of the ceremonial law. Don't eat those unclean foods, circumcise your sons, observe the proper feast days, and so on. You see, they were affirming the gospel on some level, but they were adding something to the simplicity of believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved. They were even appealing to the authority of God's word, as we will see, as they made their case for this distorted gospel. They were saying, essentially, Abraham observed these laws. You want to be sons of Abraham, don't you?
Then you must also keep these laws like he did. It was an appeal to orthodoxy, to the old paths, to the old time religion of our fathers and mothers. It seemed like it might have some validity to it.
It felt true. It sounded orthodox, but it was not the gospel. Gospel distortions come in many different shapes and sizes. Some are more obvious than others.
Some are more subtle than others. Some add to the gospel. Other distortions subtract from the gospel. Some instances of modern-day gospel distortions would include, for example, those that claim to have special revelation from God, which is then added to scripture and often placed above scripture in terms of its authority. Cults and cultic leaders do this all the time as a means of undermining the authority and sufficiency of God's word so that they can insert their own authority and sufficiency.
Other distortions of the gospel will take the language of orthodoxy and redefine it to mean something different entirely. Oftentimes, these distortions of the gospel will capitalize on the blind spots of a particular culture. The health and wealth gospel of our day comes to mind.
This distortion takes advantage of people's love for health and wealth. It makes claims that God's promises in Christ are materialistic promises, not spiritual, eternal promises. Or there's the cult of free will that so idolizes autonomy that it preaches a message of human sovereignty and diminishes God to a supposed gentleman who will never assert himself upon anyone. There's the popular distortion of the charismatic movement, which elevates personal experience above truth and reduces faith to an emotion with which to manipulate God. There's the distortion of antinomianism, lawlessness, which ironically is the opposite error that Paul had to contend with in Galatia.
This is the error that claims full freedom from any moral obligation to God, not merely in the context of justification, but also even with regard to sanctification. And incidentally, Paul will address this distortion of antinomianism before he finishes his letter to Galatia, lest they run too far in the opposite direction. Church, there are, it seems, no limit to the distortions of the Gospel. But what does Paul insist upon? He insists upon the absolute truth that there is but one Gospel, the one that has been preserved for us in the Scriptures through the apostolic witness, the one that alone is the power of God unto salvation. And so Paul says as strongly as he can, verse 8, But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a Gospel contrary to the one we preach to you, let him be accursed. He repeats it in verse 9, As we have said before, so now I say again, if anyone is preaching to you a Gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. And the word accursed refers to the strongest divine judgment possible. Let him be banished to eternal hell.
There's no qualification, no ifs, ands, or buts. It's instant rejection without question. That's how fiercely Paul resisted the preaching of a false Gospel. And why was Paul so fiercely against the preaching of a false Gospel? Well, it's because false Gospels eternally ruin the souls of men.
You see, the road to hell is lined with preaching that is almost right, but distorted just enough to deceive the unwary. Well, having laid out the purpose and focus of his letter, Paul begins the process then of persuading the Galatians back to the truth in verse 10, and he does this with a sincere defense in verse 10. He begins this process of persuasion by asserting that his motives are not self-serving. He's not playing the part of a man-pleaser. On the contrary, he's trying to please God in what he's saying. Look at verse 10. For am I now seeking the approval of man or of God?
Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ. In light of the harsh words that Paul has just said regarding the false teachers in Galatia, it should be abundantly clear that Paul is not writing this letter for popularity or fame. He's not trying to get likes on his Facebook page or views on his social media posts. And we know this because he's actually contradicting the prevailing sentiment of the Galatians.
He's swimming upstream. He's claiming that the preachers Galatia is in love with are actually heretics. This isn't the way to win friends and influence people.
This is the way to lose friends and distance people. Or it's the way to rescue people from the clutches of destructive heresies. The point is, Paul's motives are pure. And if his motives are pure, then the churches in Galatia had better at least hear him out. And so for the remainder of his letter, Paul is going to lay out the case for the pure, unadulterated gospel of Jesus Christ.
As we reflect on these opening verses of Paul's letter, a couple of truths become very obvious. First of all, I think we need to acknowledge to ourselves that novelty has a certain appeal. Novelty has a certain appeal. We by nature enjoy new things, new clothes, new cars, new jobs, new experiences. And this enjoyment of the novel, this intrigue of new things, includes our intellect. We enjoy the stimulation of thinking thoughts that have never occurred to us before.
And that's a good thing. That's how God has wired us. That's how we learn and grow and mature. But the danger comes when we begin loving the novelty, the newness of something for its own sake, even more than we love the truthfulness of something. And so the exciting, legitimate process of discovering truth that's new to us from God's Word becomes the fatal process of trying to discover maybe secret knowledge through some special revelation from God, something that God says do not pursue. Or we jump on religious fads that give us the feeling of being cutting edge or in the know, of being relevant and informed. We're drawn to the latest Christian bestseller, the newest Bible study from our favorite author. We're consumed with the hottest current Internet topic that everyone's talking about because we just don't want to get left behind. We don't want to feel left out. Novelty sells, and we're the ones buying.
Paul says if it contradicts the faith once for all delivered to the saints, it doesn't matter if its author is an apostle or an angel, a best-selling author or your best friend, have nothing to do with it. But there's a ditch in the other direction also. There's always a ditch in the other direction, isn't there? Not only does novelty have a certain appeal, tradition also has a certain appeal. Sometimes we notice people's tendency to idolize the novel, and so we react by running in the opposite direction. We reject the idolatry of change and progress and novelty, but in its place, we set up an idol of tradition.
This ditch is actually closer, I think, to what the false teachers in Galatia were doing. As we will see, they were appealing to ancient traditions, traditions that were even orthodox at one point in redemptive history. This is how Abraham did it.
Don't you want to be like him? Perhaps we're tempted to say to ourselves, this is how church used to be, or this is how my grandparents did it, or maybe this is what the Puritans would have done. And again, there may be some measure of truth to those bygone traditions, but there's also a danger we need to be wary of. The measure of truth is not the ancientness of something, how old it is, how time-tested it is, any more than it is the newness of something, how fresh and novel it is. Our measuring stick of truth, and maybe this sounds cliche and oversimplified, but it's the truth, our measuring stick of truth is Jesus Christ and him crucified. Everything prior to Calvary pointed forward to Christ. Everything since Calvary points back to Christ. This is the central tenet of the Christian faith. This is the gospel in a nutshell, and any belief or teaching or practice or innovation that challenges that tenet ought to be rejected outright. It is not up for discussion. It is clear-cut.
It is black and white. Salvation is by grace through faith in Christ alone, full stop, end of discussion. Now, I am excited to discover with you how Paul is going to defend that assertion and how he's going to unpack all the implications of that truth, but, Church, at the outset of this journey, we need to affirm that the gospel is the gospel. It doesn't change.
It doesn't need updating or revising, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a false teacher. This is the gospel that Jesus Christ gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age according to the will of our God and Father. To him be glory forever and ever. Amen.
Let's pray. God in heaven, we are so easily swayed. Our natural bent is away from truth and goodness and beauty, and it's ultimately because we want to be our own God. Forgive us, Lord, for such arrogance, and help us by the power of your Holy Spirit in us to know your truth and believe it and obey it to the saving of our souls. Thank you that in knowing your truth, we are forever set free from the lies of Satan and from the lies of our own hearts. So guard our hearts and our minds and our souls. We commit ourselves to your safekeeping, resting always in Christ, who is the only savior of sinners. In whose name we pray. Amen.
